I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.

These lines are best known from Coca‑Cola’s landmark 1971 “Hilltop” television commercial, in which a multicultural chorus sings on a hillside in Italy. The jingle was created by advertising creatives Bill Backer, Billy Davis, and Roger Cook for McCann-Erickson, and it quickly escaped the bounds of advertising: it was re-recorded as the pop single “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)” by The New Seekers (and also by The Hillside Singers). The quote reflects the era’s idealistic, post‑1960s rhetoric of global harmony, repackaged through consumer branding and mass media.

The couplet fuses utopian aspiration with commercial language. “Teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” invokes a vision of universal concord—peace imagined as a shared song. The pivot to “buy the world a Coke” deliberately collapses moral idealism into a purchasable gesture, suggesting companionship and unity can be mediated by a common product. Read sympathetically, it frames a small, everyday act as a symbol of goodwill across borders; read critically, it exemplifies how advertising appropriates the vocabulary of peace and community to create emotional attachment to a brand, turning global fellowship into a marketable feeling.

1) “I’d like to teach the world to sing / In perfect harmony.”
2) “I’d like to buy the world a home / And furnish it with love.”
3) “I’d like to buy the world a Coke / And keep it company.”